"The second and third sentence in the story are both very obviously political opinions."
To anyone experienced in the "art" of electioneering realizes that the closer you get to the poll date the more you enter into the silly season of political advertising. The point of it is to keep the base energized and to drag in as much of the fringe as you can.
And to say the third sentence is political is to deny the history of "Citizens Against" groups being funded by large corporate groups in the same way as you can expect other groups to be funded by other special interest groups. That's a fact, has been and will be. Nothing wrong with that either.
Everyone's free to do as they will but an electorate wise to these things is a better educated one and more likely to cast their vote based on other criteria.
"And yes, this is OUR dirt. Without us, the fans, there would be no Techdirt. You think Mike pulls everything from the clouds?"
Actually, I feel that Mike skated around the politics of what both videos deal with quite nicely.
I'd read it again if I were you particularly where Mike says "Now, I don't care where you stand on this political debate (personally, I think both are over-exaggerating and over-simplifying a complex issue);" a point I agree with.
And where's Mike's politics in that?
To top it all off, Techdirt has never claimed to be an "objective" news source. It's, by and large, Mike's commentary on events related events he's noticed and is interested in and that his audience. One in which he regularly expressed opinions.
If it offends your political stance that's too bad.
To place it in other aspects of culture, how many pop bands, singer/songwriters, jazz bands etc are remembered even a year or two after a hit single and certainly not 5 years.
Or how many tv shows or movies are remembered 5 to 10 years after.
All of which goes show how, as protection for artists, how ineffective copyright really is.
Let's remember too, that even The Beatles signed off their copyrights to their compositions to Northern Songs, their recorded performances to EMI and on and on. They didn't make a penny (or farthing) off the various likenesses of themselves or other things that flooded the market in 1963/64 before finally dying down a bit though they've never gone away because they'd signed away rights to all of that too.
(See George Harriosn's "It's only a Northern Song")
Re: Anyone could of dont it,, even Mike, but Google DID IT..
"if that act is an illegal, unethical, stupid thing to do"
I think you need to settle down, take whatever relaxes you, and think.
WiFi is a radio transmitter. As such it uses the public airways. So if you're fool enough or simply don't care enough, you can leave a WiFi transmitter open and leave it at that.
IF someone driving by, for whatever reason, intercepts the unencrypted signal then that someone has certainly not done anything illegal, immoral or stupid. By not encrypting the signal that someone has consented to that. Pure and simple.
Your comparing this to a case of running over a pedestrian and killing that person (not always a murder charge or any kind of criminal charge incidentally) doesn't hold even so much as a quarter teaspoon of water because they are not comparable.
By the way, your example would indicate that "you" had either deliberately run the pedestrian down or were committing a criminal act while doing it for example impaired driving, driving with undue care and attention or a host of others or simply criminal negligence, say road racing.
As Google broke no criminal law in doing this it's impossible to draw that parallel.
As for collecting and mapping WiFi locations it's anything but illegal or unethical. It's completely legal and ethical as an aide to navigation. (On land or sea if not as much in the air.)
WiFi signals like those of cell tower signals are send within the FM band and are frequency modulated even if they use a higher band which means they're directional.
Mapping them along with other known directional radio sources aids shipping in places like the straights between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia Mainland and along the Inside Passage of British Columbia and Alaska. It becomes particularly important when geo-locating satellites fall below the "horizon", say behind a mountain, and can no longer be used. If the navigator of a ship or the driver of a car can find three known WiFi sources instead of the now "disappeared" satellite they instantly know where they are.
And you'd be astonished at how much WiFi there is out there on the Inside Passage or the open ocean off the coasts of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California even if the lack of human population there makes them "remote".
No one is piggybacking on the signals, sending kiddy porn or cartoons featuring our favourite darryl in comprising positions or other such nasty things -- they're navigating. Nor do they need an unencrypted signal to do that.
According to you they can't do that.
Of course, what is highly illegal is interfering with aids to navigation but that's another story.
It's absolutely amazing how many names A-J can think up to post here under.
No need actually because we can see from the post just who it is given the over blown anger, narrowness of mind and, often, horrible English usage. All crystal clear indicators of our friend A-J.
"That business model isn't old or dead, it stil exists everywhere in the world and has for thousands of years."
The RECORDING industry was born as an industry in the early part of the 20th Century after Edison recorded Mary Had A Little Lamb on a wax cylinder not thousands of years ago. Try barely a century ago.
(Edison, by the way, had no qualms about ripping off others, breaking their patents and whatever he needed to do to make money off his stuff.)
Copyright has NOT existed for thousands of years it was "invented" by the Statue of Ann, in the 1600s, to protect publishers from from each other. The "artist" was never part of the deal and, in reality, isn't now. Check your basic arithmetic and then check your research.
The law cannot catch up or control a massive shift in how our culture(s) and consumption patterns change as a result of the Internet. It can try to protect those who are destined to fail if they don't adapt and try to slow things down but that will fail as did laws that stated that a crier with a bell or some such thing walk in front of early autos to announce that the dangerous beasts were coming, as if people couldn't hear the noise and see the belching smoke of early internal combustion engines.
If the recording and motion picture industries refuse to change then they will die. Along with broadcasting and print publishing, newspapers and others who are tied to a century and more old model. And good riddance.
Nor will silly laws that only go to prove that, often, once again that "the law is an ass!".
Something will arise to take their place. It always has because if nothing else, we humans are highly adaptive. Even if we have to copy then modify from the past to suit current situations cultural industries will continue to exist.
We may not know the form they'll take but they'll continue to exist.
Oh, and the reason that laws need to catch up is that cultural shifts and changes are taking place so quickly now that the law just can't keep up with them. Particularly things like copyright and patent law.
"But thankfully, for artists, the law is finally catching up."
Surely you mean the recording, motion picture and publishing industries along with their various hangers on
Stuff this into some of the obvious vacancy space in your brain -- COPYRIGHT HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH ARTISTS IT EXISTS TO PROTECT PUBLISHERS ALWAYS HAS AND ALWAYS WILL. At least in it's current form.
Apple has incredible customer service. That much is true.
It has become something of a cult, in more than a few negative meanings of that word, that gets overlooked by the cult. (I'm far from saying you're a member of it!)
There's the increasing control over just what and how you can put things into or onto your Apple iPod, iPad and so on. Things that only meet the approval of Steve Jobs et al. Approved apps, approved this and that.
Of course, it's their right to recommend things but I'm leaning towards Apple taking too much control over a device that once I buy it is mine, not Apple's.
Microsoft hasn't been much better just far less direct.
Ultimately customer service is the key. Remember WordPerfect? It was renowned for customer service. And rightly so.
The company and it's developers knew that not only was good customer service vital in it's own right but that it was vital in market research as well. It told the company what was wrong, what features really were in demand and just as importantly, what was right.
That's behind most of the reason that WordPerfect was able to hold off MS Word and MS Office for so long. In spite of the problems people and companies had integrating the two WordPerfect had a product that understood them, understood their needs and made it possible to easily customize it without losing it's power.
Then WordPerfect Corp was sold. The first thing that went was the customer service. In short order WP went from being a viable competitor to Word to virtual disappearance. They lost their edge because they tossed the most important connection they had to their legions of users and fans by closing down the customer service they'd given previously that resulted in the best market research tool anyone has. (The horror called Borland Office certainly didn't help even though, at the time, the parts of Borland Office were far superior to the parts that made up MS Office at the time.)
Incidentally, when Dell got started they were also very good at the customer service thingy. It was only when they became a tier one maker that customer service died and with it much of Dell's reputation for making quality machines.
Google's customer service is worse than horrific. Microsoft's is merely horrific. Adobe's is somewhere in between.
All are vulnerable there.
Yet each have their own cults some like Adobe's are based on their product line which is usually, without fail, of very high quality. Microsoft, in some ways, are still trading on tiny MS vs huge lumbering IBM though they've learned far too well from IBM how to exclude others from their market(s). Google's because they still do come up with things people seem to need in the Internet age simply because they understand it better than any other large company out there. They were born an Internet company, expanded as an Internet company and remain one.
For customer service these days, though, in spite of their own legions of flaws, Apple is the champion and so most of their customers will forgive the failings and control freak attitude Apple has.
Now, I have a question for you. Just how to you think most artists survived prior to the recording industry came into existence? Leave out the Brahm's, Litz's, Handel's of the world and just tell me.
I don't mean the well known and "successful", these days meaning overhyped for the most part, acts. (At least that much never changes.)
The odds are that the Beatles, Stones, Elvis, Zep, Mellencamps, Dixie Chicks and other well known and, by your terms, successful acts would have been hugely successful regardless of the business model. In fact, the ones I've just listed became successful and wealthy IN SPITE of the recording industry's business model not because of it.
You want to know something else? All those I've listed as well as producers such as David Foster, George Martin and a host of other successful producers got that way because, like the artists they worked with, they love music. Not because of any business model.
You're reminding me, more than most have recently, about the (in)famous A&R guys all over England who refused to sign The Beatles because "the day of the guys and guitars are over". So wedded to your own preconceptions and prejudices that you can't see beyond them just as they were.
Re: Re: Availablity of "Authorized" Representative
If profit is the goal I can't tell you. As far as the rest is concerned it's that we live in a culture that says "sue first" negotiate or try to come to terms later rather than the other way around.
I used to say Americans did that and felt smug and secure as a Canadian that we didn't but some time in the past decade or so the virus spread to Canada and now we're doing it too.
Actually I think that once the argument about whether or not what you did works, I think you'll find most of us would agree with you that a comic looks better on paper than it does on a screen.
The argument here is that engaging your fans helped or caused that spike in sales, which I hope is continuing, rather than which media is better.
"For instance, I am old enough to remember when cassette tapes were going to kill the music industry. Obviously they didn't. But the product cycle for putting out an album has increased a lot in the last 30 years, and that's got to be accounted for as well."
So am I. I'm also old enough to remember when the first high range reel to reels came out in the 50s and early 60s that that would kill music, Well the recording industry, not music but the recording industry.
The cassette came out and didn't hurt a thing. I'd hard to argue that the sales of music did anything but explode through most of the 70s when cassettes and "piracy" were running wild.
As for the argument about the product cycle being 30 times more expensive these days let me point out a few things.
1) Anyone with a decent garage, a decent desktop machine, a few Open Source pieces of software, two or thee high range microphones and a rudimentary knowledge of acoustics can set up a recording studio in a matter of days.
2) A CD/DVD/BluRay recorder is included in most PC's these days and they can turn out recordings very quickly. Add two or three more and now you're burning as an indy! So no real need for a huge pressing plant unless you're Universal Music though even for them the cost of producing shiny disks has fallen to effectively $0.00.
3) The vast majority of artists aren't signed to contracts that allow them to be paid much at all now any more than they were in the 60s. Including The Beatles. Who knows, maybe less.
Okay, so maybe the cost of payola has gone through the roof, given the crappy playlists on over the air radio these days.
In fact the cost of production has gone down, way down.
And given that the "girl" bands around now, stuff we called teeny bopper music in the 60s is just as much bopper stuff now as it was then only run through so many filters and effects that they all sound the same. (Easily done, see point #1). And it's just as much disposable tripe now as it was then. But it still sells. It sells tons! With little or no effort on the part of the recording industry.
Way back in the golden age you seem to remember so well the single was the main way of spreading music and no one except the recording industry made much on them either. But by the 70s the single was actually promotional material for the album. I'd suggest that the $1.99 single on iTunes et al are the same now.
I'm not disputing the up front cost of making music such as instruments, time to learn them, song writing and all the rest of it. I am disputing, vigorously your assertion that the cost has gone up 30 fold. I'd suggest it's actually gone down. Considerably.
And no one is automatically entitled to be paid for their art. If it's crap they won't be cause they won't be able to sell it. If it's good and they engage their audience as Watson has they will sell it and they will make money.
Oh, and I agree with Watson, I'd rather have a printed copy of a comic than a pixilized scanned version on my screen. So, if it's good I'll buy it.
While I understand the frustration with the various CC licenses I can also understand the desire of some to control commercial use.
That this ought not to mean automatically "I want a cut" doesn't seem to occur to most to slap NC on a license when that's what they want. Where I use that license I really don't care if the organization gets a cut or not. It would be nice if they did but we don't and won't insist on it.
Still, I'd agree that it's been misused so often and become so restrictive that the law of unintended consequences has struck full force.
By the way, you can use the GDL and many have. It's stretching it a bit but I can't see why you couldn't.
Failing that, the WTFPL sounds good but I don't see it being acceptable to the owners of a church web site I run. :-)
Given this discussion, though, I may consider dropping the NC component though, in this case, I can't see any commercial outfit wanting to benefit from what comes out of a small town semi rural church. Could be wrong!
It's like finding our way through a minefield to get these licenses right, no matter the sponsor of the license.
I'm near the point with copyright that I'd say it's time to chuck the whole thing as it's obviously been distorted far beyond it's original purpose to be unrecognizable. And it never was about protecting "the artist" it's always been about protecting "the publisher". The artist be damned.
Actually my cat's breath smells of the rodents she busily clears up from my semi-rural back yard!
That being said what they did was was beat a bot at it's own game as the comments on the story Mike linked to point out.
The conviction appears to be for stock manipulation rather than copying the pattern of the automated computer trading system (bot) and used that to manipulate the price of some stock.
It would logically follow, then, that the bot is just as guilty of stock manipulation but the bot and it's writers/controllers weren't being charged here.
Ideally the stock and commodity markets are about transparency so that the investor can see what they're investing in. These markets are far from ideal with all the derivatives and bots running around which are far from transparent which leaves things ripe for manipulation.
Mike's question holds though in that if it's legal for the bots to manipulate stock values then it must be legal for this pair.
Then again, for small investors, there's a better chance of making money on the lottery than investing in stocks these days given such nonsense as the dot com bubble and the housing bubble that damn near brought down the whole house of cards.
Oh boy...you can drive down the street with a hook and throw the breaker on a local transformer and take down the houses that transformer services.
Incidentally power and combined services poles are wood or concrete. Metal's a conductor, right?
You do know, I'm sure, that there's nothing at all new in this, nothing at all anything that is capable of bringing down the entire grid or a significant part of it.
And you do, or must know, that what you describe is exactly how copper thieves get their hands on the stuff they steal off poles from power companies. Well, at least until they don't do it right then they get vapourized as I said.
Of course they also take down telco wire too.
Yes, I know what happens when a large generator goes out of phase with the grid. Which is largely why a properly constructed one is protected from that possibility and one of those lines of defense is to simply shut down. 100% reliable? Not really but will you settle for something like 99% or more?
There's nothing in what you say here that isn't well known in the industry or industries like telecom that rely on and are physically run parallel to the grid in many if not most areas.
Ok, so the guy got in Oz had previous intimate knowledge of sewer system control system. And he used it to access the system and cause it to malfunction in a fit of pique. Terrorists and ex employees having a fit of pique for whatever reason. The latter is not really a terrorist he's a disgruntled ex-employee.
And yes he caused a couple of things to go haywire which really didn't do much but cause inconvenience and a few smells. Then he got caught for being stupid which is most often how these things end.
Your 2001 break in looks more like a collection of script kiddies breaking in to prove they could and once they got there not having the faintest idea what to do next. As you say, they penetrated a very well known and publicized bug in Solaris. This is called inviting an attack, in case you don't know how script kiddies work.
The 1997 incident I know nothing about. Except to point out that any air traffic control I've experienced is triple redundant at worst. Of course I'll admit the rules may be different in Canada but that's been my experience in 35 years of suppling and installing PSTN and private switching in airports in Canada as well as high level data services.
2002. A couple of terrorists have a boo at open and availalable information and you're expecting me to sign off my rights and freedoms and liberties to security agencies. I think not. Anyway, they CLAIM they got them though I note you haven't supplied any follow up in the way of charges or much else.
2003. Now just who was in charge of the Davis-Besse Reactor's computer systems and the security of the same? And as it was an exploit on MS SQL desktop databases and the back end of same just what the heck were they doing running an insecure MS system to hold critical information on in the first damned place? Taking advantage of a well known flaw in MSDE that obviously had never been patched.
You certainly don't need to be a terrorist, foreign power or run of the mill practitioner of industrial espionage to break into an unpatched desktop OS particularly Microsoft's.
I'm sure you are who and what you say you are and that's, perhaps, why you use the previously unknown spelling of physics -- phsics. I must have skipped those classes.
Nice try at FUD, though. Interesting how, when your FUD is looked into even a teeny tiny bit that it turns out to be another case of someone yelling that the sky is falling and it's the terrorists fault! You'd think after 9 years you'd get tired of that but apparently not.
Is it possible for evil doers to take down the grid. I guess so. If they're halfway good at it none of us will know until the moment they do it anyway. But somehow I doubt it.
As I said before nature is far better at it and that's one of the reasons we get 660kv shorts or grounds that take out a relatively small area, or 1.5 kV grounds and shorts that knock out the neigbour hood all the time.
So, you see, I'd rather worry about something I can do something about.
And it's not like that if China, say, wants to cyber terrorize the United States that the United States isn't just as capable of cyber terrorizing China right back.
On the post: Hadopi Already Up To Sending Out 25,000 'First Strike' Notices Per Day
Re: Re: 50K angry customers a day
I was kidding above when I said you wanted us to believe that you played bass for Zep.
Now I'm starting to think you believe it yourself.
Oh, and I'm soooooo insulted by your grade school insults.
Now report to the office, you have an appointment with the Vice Principal and his handy strap.
On the post: Hadopi Already Up To Sending Out 25,000 'First Strike' Notices Per Day
Re: Re: Re: Re: France, the country full of outlaws?
On the post: Lobbying Group Issues Takedown For Parody Political Ads By Student Group
Re: Re: Re: Bah
To anyone experienced in the "art" of electioneering realizes that the closer you get to the poll date the more you enter into the silly season of political advertising. The point of it is to keep the base energized and to drag in as much of the fringe as you can.
And to say the third sentence is political is to deny the history of "Citizens Against" groups being funded by large corporate groups in the same way as you can expect other groups to be funded by other special interest groups. That's a fact, has been and will be. Nothing wrong with that either.
Everyone's free to do as they will but an electorate wise to these things is a better educated one and more likely to cast their vote based on other criteria.
"And yes, this is OUR dirt. Without us, the fans, there would be no Techdirt. You think Mike pulls everything from the clouds?"
Well, he pulled you from the Cloud didn't he?
On the post: Lobbying Group Issues Takedown For Parody Political Ads By Student Group
Re: Re: Bah
I'd read it again if I were you particularly where Mike says "Now, I don't care where you stand on this political debate (personally, I think both are over-exaggerating and over-simplifying a complex issue);" a point I agree with.
And where's Mike's politics in that?
To top it all off, Techdirt has never claimed to be an "objective" news source. It's, by and large, Mike's commentary on events related events he's noticed and is interested in and that his audience. One in which he regularly expressed opinions.
If it offends your political stance that's too bad.
On the post: Lobbying Group Issues Takedown For Parody Political Ads By Student Group
Re: There's Plenty of Astroturf to Go Around
Oh, and by the way, when did university students cease to be citizens? At least the majority of them who would be U.S. born and bred.
On the post: Is Mark Twain's 'New' Autobiography Covered By Copyright?
Re: Re:
Or how many tv shows or movies are remembered 5 to 10 years after.
All of which goes show how, as protection for artists, how ineffective copyright really is.
Let's remember too, that even The Beatles signed off their copyrights to their compositions to Northern Songs, their recorded performances to EMI and on and on. They didn't make a penny (or farthing) off the various likenesses of themselves or other things that flooded the market in 1963/64 before finally dying down a bit though they've never gone away because they'd signed away rights to all of that too.
(See George Harriosn's "It's only a Northern Song")
On the post: Focusing On Google Getting Emails & Passwords Via Data Collection Misses The Point: Anyone Could Have Done It
Re: Anyone could of dont it,, even Mike, but Google DID IT..
I think you need to settle down, take whatever relaxes you, and think.
WiFi is a radio transmitter. As such it uses the public airways. So if you're fool enough or simply don't care enough, you can leave a WiFi transmitter open and leave it at that.
IF someone driving by, for whatever reason, intercepts the unencrypted signal then that someone has certainly not done anything illegal, immoral or stupid. By not encrypting the signal that someone has consented to that. Pure and simple.
Your comparing this to a case of running over a pedestrian and killing that person (not always a murder charge or any kind of criminal charge incidentally) doesn't hold even so much as a quarter teaspoon of water because they are not comparable.
By the way, your example would indicate that "you" had either deliberately run the pedestrian down or were committing a criminal act while doing it for example impaired driving, driving with undue care and attention or a host of others or simply criminal negligence, say road racing.
As Google broke no criminal law in doing this it's impossible to draw that parallel.
As for collecting and mapping WiFi locations it's anything but illegal or unethical. It's completely legal and ethical as an aide to navigation. (On land or sea if not as much in the air.)
WiFi signals like those of cell tower signals are send within the FM band and are frequency modulated even if they use a higher band which means they're directional.
Mapping them along with other known directional radio sources aids shipping in places like the straights between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia Mainland and along the Inside Passage of British Columbia and Alaska. It becomes particularly important when geo-locating satellites fall below the "horizon", say behind a mountain, and can no longer be used. If the navigator of a ship or the driver of a car can find three known WiFi sources instead of the now "disappeared" satellite they instantly know where they are.
And you'd be astonished at how much WiFi there is out there on the Inside Passage or the open ocean off the coasts of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California even if the lack of human population there makes them "remote".
No one is piggybacking on the signals, sending kiddy porn or cartoons featuring our favourite darryl in comprising positions or other such nasty things -- they're navigating. Nor do they need an unencrypted signal to do that.
According to you they can't do that.
Of course, what is highly illegal is interfering with aids to navigation but that's another story.
On the post: Fallacy Debunking: Successful New Business Model Examples Are The 'Exception'
Re: Re:
No need actually because we can see from the post just who it is given the over blown anger, narrowness of mind and, often, horrible English usage. All crystal clear indicators of our friend A-J.
On the post: Fallacy Debunking: Successful New Business Model Examples Are The 'Exception'
Re: Re: Re:
"That business model isn't old or dead, it stil exists everywhere in the world and has for thousands of years."
The RECORDING industry was born as an industry in the early part of the 20th Century after Edison recorded Mary Had A Little Lamb on a wax cylinder not thousands of years ago. Try barely a century ago.
(Edison, by the way, had no qualms about ripping off others, breaking their patents and whatever he needed to do to make money off his stuff.)
Copyright has NOT existed for thousands of years it was "invented" by the Statue of Ann, in the 1600s, to protect publishers from from each other. The "artist" was never part of the deal and, in reality, isn't now. Check your basic arithmetic and then check your research.
The law cannot catch up or control a massive shift in how our culture(s) and consumption patterns change as a result of the Internet. It can try to protect those who are destined to fail if they don't adapt and try to slow things down but that will fail as did laws that stated that a crier with a bell or some such thing walk in front of early autos to announce that the dangerous beasts were coming, as if people couldn't hear the noise and see the belching smoke of early internal combustion engines.
If the recording and motion picture industries refuse to change then they will die. Along with broadcasting and print publishing, newspapers and others who are tied to a century and more old model. And good riddance.
Nor will silly laws that only go to prove that, often, once again that "the law is an ass!".
Something will arise to take their place. It always has because if nothing else, we humans are highly adaptive. Even if we have to copy then modify from the past to suit current situations cultural industries will continue to exist.
We may not know the form they'll take but they'll continue to exist.
Oh, and the reason that laws need to catch up is that cultural shifts and changes are taking place so quickly now that the law just can't keep up with them. Particularly things like copyright and patent law.
"But thankfully, for artists, the law is finally catching up."
Surely you mean the recording, motion picture and publishing industries along with their various hangers on
Stuff this into some of the obvious vacancy space in your brain -- COPYRIGHT HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH ARTISTS IT EXISTS TO PROTECT PUBLISHERS ALWAYS HAS AND ALWAYS WILL. At least in it's current form.
On the post: There's Always A Way To Compete: Competing With Google By Being Human
Re: Sorry I wasn't FIRST with this post
It has become something of a cult, in more than a few negative meanings of that word, that gets overlooked by the cult. (I'm far from saying you're a member of it!)
There's the increasing control over just what and how you can put things into or onto your Apple iPod, iPad and so on. Things that only meet the approval of Steve Jobs et al. Approved apps, approved this and that.
Of course, it's their right to recommend things but I'm leaning towards Apple taking too much control over a device that once I buy it is mine, not Apple's.
Microsoft hasn't been much better just far less direct.
Ultimately customer service is the key. Remember WordPerfect? It was renowned for customer service. And rightly so.
The company and it's developers knew that not only was good customer service vital in it's own right but that it was vital in market research as well. It told the company what was wrong, what features really were in demand and just as importantly, what was right.
That's behind most of the reason that WordPerfect was able to hold off MS Word and MS Office for so long. In spite of the problems people and companies had integrating the two WordPerfect had a product that understood them, understood their needs and made it possible to easily customize it without losing it's power.
Then WordPerfect Corp was sold. The first thing that went was the customer service. In short order WP went from being a viable competitor to Word to virtual disappearance. They lost their edge because they tossed the most important connection they had to their legions of users and fans by closing down the customer service they'd given previously that resulted in the best market research tool anyone has. (The horror called Borland Office certainly didn't help even though, at the time, the parts of Borland Office were far superior to the parts that made up MS Office at the time.)
Incidentally, when Dell got started they were also very good at the customer service thingy. It was only when they became a tier one maker that customer service died and with it much of Dell's reputation for making quality machines.
Google's customer service is worse than horrific. Microsoft's is merely horrific. Adobe's is somewhere in between.
All are vulnerable there.
Yet each have their own cults some like Adobe's are based on their product line which is usually, without fail, of very high quality. Microsoft, in some ways, are still trading on tiny MS vs huge lumbering IBM though they've learned far too well from IBM how to exclude others from their market(s). Google's because they still do come up with things people seem to need in the Internet age simply because they understand it better than any other large company out there. They were born an Internet company, expanded as an Internet company and remain one.
For customer service these days, though, in spite of their own legions of flaws, Apple is the champion and so most of their customers will forgive the failings and control freak attitude Apple has.
On the post: Fallacy Debunking: Successful New Business Model Examples Are The 'Exception'
Re:
The Grateful Dead.
Now, I have a question for you. Just how to you think most artists survived prior to the recording industry came into existence? Leave out the Brahm's, Litz's, Handel's of the world and just tell me.
I don't mean the well known and "successful", these days meaning overhyped for the most part, acts. (At least that much never changes.)
The odds are that the Beatles, Stones, Elvis, Zep, Mellencamps, Dixie Chicks and other well known and, by your terms, successful acts would have been hugely successful regardless of the business model. In fact, the ones I've just listed became successful and wealthy IN SPITE of the recording industry's business model not because of it.
You want to know something else? All those I've listed as well as producers such as David Foster, George Martin and a host of other successful producers got that way because, like the artists they worked with, they love music. Not because of any business model.
You're reminding me, more than most have recently, about the (in)famous A&R guys all over England who refused to sign The Beatles because "the day of the guys and guitars are over". So wedded to your own preconceptions and prejudices that you can't see beyond them just as they were.
On the post: Supreme Court Chief Justice Admits He Doesn't Read Online EULAs Or Other 'Fine Print'
Re: Re: Availablity of "Authorized" Representative
I used to say Americans did that and felt smug and secure as a Canadian that we didn't but some time in the past decade or so the virus spread to Canada and now we're doing it too.
So much for feeling smug and self satisfied :)
On the post: China's Main Newspaper Complains That The iPad Is Too Damn Legal
It's not like we don't know that but of all the house organs in the world you'd thing the People's Daily News would be cheering the lock down.
Think Steve Jobs will get the message that maybe he's crossed a bridge too far with this one?
Nahhh. The MSM and most tech sites will go miles over the top and breathless with the next Apple toy, just as they always do.
Next act. Apple accused the Chinese Communist Party with piracy and illegally cracking the iPad. News at 11!
On the post: Chilean Miner Copyrights Note Announcing Trapped Miners Were OK
Give him the original, keep a copy in the national archives, deed done. Oh, deny the copyright, too.
On the post: Comic Book 'Pirated' On 4Chan, Author Joins Discussion... Watches Sales Soar
Re: The artist of the comic says hi.
The argument here is that engaging your fans helped or caused that spike in sales, which I hope is continuing, rather than which media is better.
Thanks for coming by!
On the post: Comic Book 'Pirated' On 4Chan, Author Joins Discussion... Watches Sales Soar
Re:
So am I. I'm also old enough to remember when the first high range reel to reels came out in the 50s and early 60s that that would kill music, Well the recording industry, not music but the recording industry.
The cassette came out and didn't hurt a thing. I'd hard to argue that the sales of music did anything but explode through most of the 70s when cassettes and "piracy" were running wild.
As for the argument about the product cycle being 30 times more expensive these days let me point out a few things.
1) Anyone with a decent garage, a decent desktop machine, a few Open Source pieces of software, two or thee high range microphones and a rudimentary knowledge of acoustics can set up a recording studio in a matter of days.
2) A CD/DVD/BluRay recorder is included in most PC's these days and they can turn out recordings very quickly. Add two or three more and now you're burning as an indy! So no real need for a huge pressing plant unless you're Universal Music though even for them the cost of producing shiny disks has fallen to effectively $0.00.
3) The vast majority of artists aren't signed to contracts that allow them to be paid much at all now any more than they were in the 60s. Including The Beatles. Who knows, maybe less.
Okay, so maybe the cost of payola has gone through the roof, given the crappy playlists on over the air radio these days.
In fact the cost of production has gone down, way down.
And given that the "girl" bands around now, stuff we called teeny bopper music in the 60s is just as much bopper stuff now as it was then only run through so many filters and effects that they all sound the same. (Easily done, see point #1). And it's just as much disposable tripe now as it was then. But it still sells. It sells tons! With little or no effort on the part of the recording industry.
Way back in the golden age you seem to remember so well the single was the main way of spreading music and no one except the recording industry made much on them either. But by the 70s the single was actually promotional material for the album. I'd suggest that the $1.99 single on iTunes et al are the same now.
I'm not disputing the up front cost of making music such as instruments, time to learn them, song writing and all the rest of it. I am disputing, vigorously your assertion that the cost has gone up 30 fold. I'd suggest it's actually gone down. Considerably.
And no one is automatically entitled to be paid for their art. If it's crap they won't be cause they won't be able to sell it. If it's good and they engage their audience as Watson has they will sell it and they will make money.
Oh, and I agree with Watson, I'd rather have a printed copy of a comic than a pixilized scanned version on my screen. So, if it's good I'll buy it.
Now, it's time to go off and look into it.
On the post: Comic Book 'Pirated' On 4Chan, Author Joins Discussion... Watches Sales Soar
Re: Re:
On the post: Creative Commons' Branding Confusion
That this ought not to mean automatically "I want a cut" doesn't seem to occur to most to slap NC on a license when that's what they want. Where I use that license I really don't care if the organization gets a cut or not. It would be nice if they did but we don't and won't insist on it.
Still, I'd agree that it's been misused so often and become so restrictive that the law of unintended consequences has struck full force.
By the way, you can use the GDL and many have. It's stretching it a bit but I can't see why you couldn't.
Failing that, the WTFPL sounds good but I don't see it being acceptable to the owners of a church web site I run. :-)
Given this discussion, though, I may consider dropping the NC component though, in this case, I can't see any commercial outfit wanting to benefit from what comes out of a small town semi rural church. Could be wrong!
It's like finding our way through a minefield to get these licenses right, no matter the sponsor of the license.
I'm near the point with copyright that I'd say it's time to chuck the whole thing as it's obviously been distorted far beyond it's original purpose to be unrecognizable. And it never was about protecting "the artist" it's always been about protecting "the publisher". The artist be damned.
Ditto for patents.
On the post: Traders Convicted For Figuring Out Auto Trading Algorithm; How Is That Illegal?
Re: I think the bigger point is being missed.
That being said what they did was was beat a bot at it's own game as the comments on the story Mike linked to point out.
The conviction appears to be for stock manipulation rather than copying the pattern of the automated computer trading system (bot) and used that to manipulate the price of some stock.
It would logically follow, then, that the bot is just as guilty of stock manipulation but the bot and it's writers/controllers weren't being charged here.
Ideally the stock and commodity markets are about transparency so that the investor can see what they're investing in. These markets are far from ideal with all the derivatives and bots running around which are far from transparent which leaves things ripe for manipulation.
Mike's question holds though in that if it's legal for the bots to manipulate stock values then it must be legal for this pair.
Then again, for small investors, there's a better chance of making money on the lottery than investing in stocks these days given such nonsense as the dot com bubble and the housing bubble that damn near brought down the whole house of cards.
On the post: Cyberwar Hype Leaps To The UK, While Electric Grid Expert Calls Claims Of Attacks 'Hooey'
Re: Lots of proof, if you look..
Incidentally power and combined services poles are wood or concrete. Metal's a conductor, right?
You do know, I'm sure, that there's nothing at all new in this, nothing at all anything that is capable of bringing down the entire grid or a significant part of it.
And you do, or must know, that what you describe is exactly how copper thieves get their hands on the stuff they steal off poles from power companies. Well, at least until they don't do it right then they get vapourized as I said.
Of course they also take down telco wire too.
Yes, I know what happens when a large generator goes out of phase with the grid. Which is largely why a properly constructed one is protected from that possibility and one of those lines of defense is to simply shut down. 100% reliable? Not really but will you settle for something like 99% or more?
There's nothing in what you say here that isn't well known in the industry or industries like telecom that rely on and are physically run parallel to the grid in many if not most areas.
Ok, so the guy got in Oz had previous intimate knowledge of sewer system control system. And he used it to access the system and cause it to malfunction in a fit of pique. Terrorists and ex employees having a fit of pique for whatever reason. The latter is not really a terrorist he's a disgruntled ex-employee.
And yes he caused a couple of things to go haywire which really didn't do much but cause inconvenience and a few smells. Then he got caught for being stupid which is most often how these things end.
Your 2001 break in looks more like a collection of script kiddies breaking in to prove they could and once they got there not having the faintest idea what to do next. As you say, they penetrated a very well known and publicized bug in Solaris. This is called inviting an attack, in case you don't know how script kiddies work.
The 1997 incident I know nothing about. Except to point out that any air traffic control I've experienced is triple redundant at worst. Of course I'll admit the rules may be different in Canada but that's been my experience in 35 years of suppling and installing PSTN and private switching in airports in Canada as well as high level data services.
2002. A couple of terrorists have a boo at open and availalable information and you're expecting me to sign off my rights and freedoms and liberties to security agencies. I think not. Anyway, they CLAIM they got them though I note you haven't supplied any follow up in the way of charges or much else.
2003. Now just who was in charge of the Davis-Besse Reactor's computer systems and the security of the same? And as it was an exploit on MS SQL desktop databases and the back end of same just what the heck were they doing running an insecure MS system to hold critical information on in the first damned place? Taking advantage of a well known flaw in MSDE that obviously had never been patched.
You certainly don't need to be a terrorist, foreign power or run of the mill practitioner of industrial espionage to break into an unpatched desktop OS particularly Microsoft's.
I'm sure you are who and what you say you are and that's, perhaps, why you use the previously unknown spelling of physics -- phsics. I must have skipped those classes.
Nice try at FUD, though. Interesting how, when your FUD is looked into even a teeny tiny bit that it turns out to be another case of someone yelling that the sky is falling and it's the terrorists fault! You'd think after 9 years you'd get tired of that but apparently not.
Is it possible for evil doers to take down the grid. I guess so. If they're halfway good at it none of us will know until the moment they do it anyway. But somehow I doubt it.
As I said before nature is far better at it and that's one of the reasons we get 660kv shorts or grounds that take out a relatively small area, or 1.5 kV grounds and shorts that knock out the neigbour hood all the time.
So, you see, I'd rather worry about something I can do something about.
And it's not like that if China, say, wants to cyber terrorize the United States that the United States isn't just as capable of cyber terrorizing China right back.
Either way. Straw man.
Next conspiracy theory please!
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